Tech

10 Must-Have Chrome Extensions for Developers

10 Must-Have Chrome Extensions for Developers

A must-have extension for many web developers, and for good reason, Firebug allows you to analyze network performance and activity, and edit, debug and monitor HTML, CSS and JavaScript live on any web page. It's not a substitute for Chrome Developer Tools, but works alongside it to allow you to debug with ease.

Written in JavaScript, it is integrated into the toolbar and can be activated on a particular domain. It loads before all other scripts and is quick to load itself, as all code and images are stored in the extensions directory on your machine.

The official port of the long-time favorite Firefox extension, Web Developer, takes the form of a toolbar and boasts a wealth of options, including analyzing web pages and layouts, testing your code and making edits on the fly.

While not as feature-rich as its Firefox counterpart, it still offers a variety of invaluable tools, such as the ability to show hidden elements, populate forms, control browser cache and quickly modify and switch between stylesheets.

When you're working on the web, browser tabs management is a priceless skill -- it's so easy to slip into bad habits and become "tab happy." Session Manager saves your browsing state and lets you re-open the session later. It is particularly useful if you find yourself opening the same web pages over and over.

The extension groups and saves related tabs, so for example, you could save your favorite news or social networking sites under their own session names, and then quickly access them without having to individually open each website.

This simple but supremely useful extension allows you to clear your cache from the toolbar. It works "silently," meaning there are no annoying popups or confirmation dialogs to distract you. It's completely customizable in terms of how much data you want to clear, including app cache, downloads, file systems, form data, history, local storage, passwords and much more, available in the Options settings.

Combine this with the extension Edit This Cookie and you have perfect control of your cache and cookies, for web development.

While experienced web developers can simply look at a website's source code to understand what frameworks and technologies it's using, or even use a resource such as Built With, a quicker, more convenient way exists for Chrome. Chrome Sniffer lists all known JavaScript libraries and CMS frameworks that a websites uses, and can currently detect more than 100 popular CMS and JavaScript libraries.

Once installed, an icon will appear on the address bar indicating the detected frameworks on a website, with version detection. The code for the extension itself is GPL, available on GitHub.

As a developer working with RESTful API, reading raw JSON data on a browser can be painfully awkward. It's much easier to read well formatted JSON in tree view, rather than in its raw data format. The Chrome extension JSONView (an unofficial port of the Firefox extension), helps you view JSON documents in the browser.

Instead of being forced to download or be rendered as text, the extension presents documents in the browser similar to how XML documents are shown. The document is formatted and highlighted, and arrays and objects can be collapsed and expanded.

The process of testing the look and feel of your website in different resolutions is not one many web developers look forward to. What Resolution Test does, though, is to make that process efficiently straightforward. The extension changes the size of the browser window to preview the website in different screen resolutions. Choose from a list of commonly used screen resolutions, with an option to customize the list according to your requirements.

Click on a specific resolution or a combination thereof and hit "View all selected." The browser window launches and resizes to the exact specifications you asked for.

Inspired by the lack of a good cookie manager in Chrome, Edit This Cookie fills that role with ease. The clean, organized interface makes it simple to edit, add, delete, search, protect or block cookies. It presents your current cookies, their values and what properties are attached to the cookie, all of which can be modified.

It's easy to export or import cookies, limit the expiration date of any cookie, or even create a custom cookie -- you will find the "Delete All" feature supremely useful, too. Using the extension proves much quicker than going through the Chrome settings screen to search for cookies related to a particular website.

Created by Google, Page Speed Insights analyzes all aspects of a page load, including resources, DOM, network and the timeline, and provides suggestions to make them faster. It integrates well with the Developer Tools toolset and runs the open-source PageSpeed Insights SDK securely, to optimize images, JavaScript, CSS and HTML resources on a website.

It gives specific suggestions for improvement and generates a numeric score, indicating the room for improvement on the current page. When a page is being analyzed, PageSpeed displays the list of web performance best practices, sorted by importance and priority.

Also of note is YSlow, Yahoo's page performance extension that uses either a predefined or a user-defined rule set.

A potential Swiss army knife for web service developers, Postman is a powerful HTTP client to let you test REST web services. With its incredibly clean and intuitive interface and a rich feature set, it's an ideal way to quickly test your requests when developing a REST app. Being able to switch environment variables, from local testing to deploying to the cloud and testing there, is supremely useful. The low learning curve also means you will be building and testing RESTful web services quickly.

Requests can be grouped into collections, enabling support for multiple projects, with the ability to export and share these collections with others, allowing you to collaborate on the same set of requests.

Working on the web means spending huge chunks of your time within the browser. If Google Chrome is your workhorse of choice, it pays to explore what extensions are available to make your daily tasks less of a chore.

While Chrome has a set of developer tools built in, you can access a wealth of extra extensions that add valuable functionality.

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